Let's get something straight: an FAQ is not HELP. Yes, PayPal, this means you. As apparently everyone but a certain class of web administrator knows, FAQ stands for "Frequently Asked Questions". FAQs were invented on Usenet, a now unfashionable collection of worldwide discussion newsgroups you may know as "Google Groups".

FAQs were a specific response to a specific problem: the constant flow of newcomers interrupting more interesting discussions by asking questions everyone had already answered hundreds of times. The correct name should have been QWWWALF, for "Questions We Wish Were Asked Less Frequently".

FAQs never tried to be comprehensive and they were not, primarily, intended to help the people who were churlishly told to read them. They were intended to lower the insiders' annoyance level. As such, they were so obviously a good idea that they have been very widely copied.

They shouldn't be. FAQs should be used to do the job they were invented for: give answers to questions people ask frequently. They are a very bad way to teach anyone how a system works. For one thing, unless you've studied the questions closely you don't know what people ask frequently. For another, the question-and-answer structure encourages poorly trained web designers to display each answer on its own page, which makes reading FAQs deeply tedious. Finally, questions have to be phrased succinctly, and finding the answer a user wants depends on that person's ability to guess how you might have phrased or categorised the question. If I knew this, I wouldn't be trying to access the online help.

Help should be just that: help. It should make it easy - or at least possible - for someone to learn how to use your system. FAQs may be randomly arranged; help must be organised.

"What happens when someone sends me money?" or "Do multiple currencies show up separately in my account or is everything converted to British pounds?" may not be frequently asked questions, but they're what I wanted to know on Saturday night when I fruitlessly accessed PayPal's so-called help system. What I wanted was a help file titled "Receiving money" that went through, in order, what happens in my account when someone enters an email address to send me funds. What I got was a list of topics, each of which, when examined, was just a list of questions, none relevant.

I know why people do this. Questions are modular. If you forgot something, you just throw another question in the search pond. But to make help, you have to think. You have to plan. You have to organise. And most of all, you have to imagine you are a new user coming to your site. What would you want to know? Now, there's a frequently asked question I wish someone would answer.

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